When David was in his mid-30’s he was returning from his honeymoon with his new wife and was rear-ended by a semi on I-95. His new wife was killed and David was severely injured, including a head injury that he dealt with for the rest of his life.

Some people may have been bitter toward the world after that, but David took some of the money he received in a settlement and created the Krempels Brain Injury Center for people who are living with acquired brain injury to create a community-based program where people could recover and learn to live with their injuries. The Krempels Center is more than a program - it is a community of support. I loved David’s phrase, “You’re not who you were, be who you are”. It is a beautiful sentiment we should all internalize.

Despite the twist life threw him, David leaves a legacy of helping others and having made a real difference with his life.

TLW and I have had a lovely holiday season so far. We’ve spent time with family, exchanged presents, eaten good food, and even gone ice skating, which is not a thing I do, and managed to only fall down once. Our tradition is to pack up the holiday decorations on New Year’s Day, bringing the season to a close.

The idea of bringing the season to a close made me think of the lyrics to one of my favorite Christmas songs, Old City Bar, by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra (their Christmas Eve and Other Stories, is my favorite holiday album). One stanza of the song goes

If you want to arrange it
This world you can change it
If we could somehow make this
Christmas thing last

Old City Bar is one part of a story arc of the album. It draws on the universal stranger myth, asking for charity. A mysterious “child” walks into a dive bar and talks to the bartender:

And he asked did we know
That outside in the snow
That someone was lost
Standing outside our door

Then the bartender gazed
Through the smoke and the haze
Through the window and ice
To a corner streetlight

Where standing alone
By a broken pay phone
Was a girl the child said
Could no longer get home

And the snow it was falling
The neon was calling
The bartender turned
And said, not that I care
But how would you know this?
The child said I’ve noticed
If one could be home
They’d be all ready there

I especially love those last two lines – if you could be home, you would already be there. That’s how we know you are in distress. It’s Christmas and you are not home. But it also highlights the nature of the season. Home. Making a home. A place of belonging and connection.

This song is 30 years old, so I don’t feel too bad about giving away the punchline, but the bartender heart is softened and he winds up giving the girl money so she can get home. Here’s a video of a live performance of the song that I think is well done:

Charity transforms the bartender and the bar flies in the song, as charity does to us as well.

The holiday season for me is a season of charity. The cold begins to penetrate our lives in earnest. The world gets to its darkest just before Christmas. And then we gather to demonstrate our caring to one another. It’s hard not to have your heart softened during such a time.

Charity in the Christian sense is not just about giving money. It’s easy to go through the motions of giving money. In fact, it can be quite performative and self-aggrandizing. Real charity is based in willing good for another, without expectation of return. The channels look the same - money, services, goods, whatever flowing to those who are in need - but intent matters. I think it is the intent, coupled with the act, that is transformative. From 1 Corinthians 13:3: “If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing.”

Charity begins with the people closest to us because that is the most natural. If you can’t love the people who are closest to you, then it will be hard for you to genuinely love the stranger. And by love, I mean what Saint Thomas Aquinas meant – willing good for another, without expectation of return. Love in this sense is not an emotion, it is a decision. It doesn’t require liking the object. It requires deciding and doing.

For me, one of the most moving parts of the New Testament is the invocation of the stranger myth in Matthew 25:35-40:

35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

In this Flourishing in the World series of newsletters I have been trying to clarify for myself what it means to live a worthy life. Although I am making multiple religious references here, I am looking for an answer that works for a secular approach as well. I keep coming back to Erik Erikson’s questions that we ask at each stage of our lives, the final one being, “Is it ok to have been me?” I give this question a deeper treatment here, but let me just summarize my thoughts. We all have gifts that came to us through no action of our own – our circumstances at birth that include our genetic endowments of health, intelligence, and talent, as well as our family circumstances and cultural inheritance. We have an obligation to do as much as we can with those gifts to become the best person we have the potential to be. We can answer “yes” to Erikson’s question if we have pushed ourselves to be all we can be. And part of that becoming is pursuing connection and contribution. Charity, in the Christian sense, is at the heart of connection and contribution.

Charity is an opportunity to be better every day. To be a charitable person is something that has to be renewed constantly. It is not enough to write a check to a charity once a year to be charitable. It is not enough to feel it during the holiday season and put it away on New Year’s Day. As the song says, “If we could somehow make this / Christmas thing last.” It is a way of living and being that resets constantly with each interaction with another human being.

To live a worthy life is to strive every day to be better.

Thanks for reading and joining me on this journey.

Willing good for all of you.

Greetings Friends –

I apologize for missing this past weekend’s FITW newsletter. I had a deadline to finish a white paper and spent most of the weekend working on that and just didn’t have gas left in the tank.

I foresee this happening more in the near future, so I am planning to take a leave of absence in the new year from writing FITW and RWL. For those of you who are paid subscribers, I will be turning off payments during this time. It’s really hard for me to imagine not sitting down at my computer to bang out a couple of newsletters each week, but I with my new responsibilities, I think it is the best thing.

I am considering what the project will look like when I return. Should I continue with RWL? I’ve been writing it for most of 10 years, having published 477 of them. Should I continue FITW? I’ve published 127 since I launched the project in 2023. Should I make space for the Flourishing in the World podcast, which I put on a shelf this summer and have not had time to bring back. To that end, I am asking you for your feedback about all three projects.

Please consider taking the short reader survey to help me decide what the future of the project should look like: FITW reader survey – Fill out form

Thanks for hanging with me. Some of you have been with me since close to the beginning, and that is really awesome. Thanks in advance for taking the time to give me some feedback.

Mark

- Gustave Flaubert

I saw this quote in the Economist this week. It is a more elegant statement of my mantra, boring is better.

I know I have been obsessing about the third happiness, psychological richness, but this is a further point. Where should you find your psychological richness? Find it in your Work. Not necessarily your work, but your Work. The thing that gives your life meaning. That is not necessarily the thing that brings you income (lower-case w work). But to pursue your Work, you have to set aside other things and focus your creativity and energy on your Work.

By keeping the rest of your life stable and orderly, you retain more of your energy for your Work.

I don’t literally mean to lead a boring life outside of your work. Instead, deepen your commitments to your life choices, rather than changing them frivolously in pursuit of the new. Look for the new and exciting in your Work.

I’ve written a few times about what I call the “U” of Doom – the fact that most of us reach our least happy time at midlife, and that lack of happiness tends to lead to a mid-life crisis. The simplified graphic above is based on psychology research I cite in my original post on the topic.

I keep coming back to the question of why this pattern exists. Why do we tend to bottom out at midlife? And it seems that this bottoming out happens independently of what we would typically think of as success.

I’ve also written about the two kinds of happiness that come down to us from the Ancient Greeks -

Hedonia refers to happiness as pleasure (and freedom from pain), sometimes also referred to as experienced happiness. This is the happiness we have from a good meal, going to a party, spending time with friends, sex, and other joys of the moment.

Eudaimonia is reflective happiness. It comes from looking back on your life and seeing it as full of purpose and meaning.

A couple of years ago I came across a new concept of happiness, psychological richness. I wrote about it a couple of months ago here. In brief, when you pursue psychological richness, you do things for the experience, to expand your emotional range. You do it for the thrill, not because it is pleasurable (it might not be) and not because it is socially good (it may or may not be). Psychological richness is experienced in the moment as well as in reflection. Upon reflection, people often express regret that they did not take more chances, as I noted.

I left my post about psychological richness with ambivalence, but I’ve been thinking about it since, and I think maybe it can help understand the “U” of Doom. I think eudaimonia and psychological richness interact to help shape the U. I think hedonia is incidental because of its fleeting nature.

I think we experience hedonia a bit like a sine curve – fluctuating up and down along some baseline of experience. There is a psychological literature that find we all have a base level of hedonic happiness that we tend to revert to. It seems to be at least partially genetic. It leads to the hedonic treadmill – when we get some new, good thing, like a new car, we get a temporary boost of happiness, but eventually we return to our baseline level of hedonic happiness. Likewise, happily, when something bad happens to us, we eventually adapt and return to our baseline level as well. This was the point of my post about QALYs a few weeks ago.

The “U” of Doom is really about long-term, reflective happiness. Perhaps a better way to model hedonia would be to have the U of doom line be made up of fluctuations. I just lack the Power Point skill to bend my sine curve line, so I’ll leave that to your imagination.

I’m going outside of the literature that I have read to speculate now about the interaction between eudaimonia and psychological richness, and how the interaction explains the “U” shape of happiness, but see if you agree.

I think one of the reasons we see happiness rise after mid-life is we come to terms with the things we have done and the things we have contributed. You can’t really point at your life with the pride of accomplishment if you haven’t lived enough of life to point back at your accomplishments. Working with undergraduates for 10 years now, I hear them worry about the uncertainty of what they will do with their lives and whether it will matter. I ask all of my students when they are juniors how they will know if they have been successful 10 or 20 years from now. Two of the most common responses are 1) if they are happy, and 2) if they have made a difference. Eudaimonia links the two together.

I think the slope of eudaimonia, from a low point early in life to a higher point as we age accurately explains the angst that comes over us in our teen years. We realize that we haven’t done anything, that we are wards of our parents and exist only as a result of their generosity. Our existence doesn’t really matter, except to our family and friends, but not to the wider world. We are potential, not actual, until we begin to act in the world. As we begin to contribute, we start to experience reflective happiness.

Rising eudaimonia explains why the “U” of Doom turns back upward, but why does it fall? I think the experience of psychological richness explains the fall. Whether you are a risk-taker or conservative, everything is new to you as a child. The world opens up as you experience it for the first time. Think of all your firsts and how exciting they were. You can never experience something for the first time again. Psychological richness involves the pursuit of new, life altering experiences. It is the pursuit of firsts. But as we experience more of life, there are definitionally fewer firsts. You can chase them, but going from 10 to 11 is less of a change than going from 100 to 101.

My point is that you cannot have the big firsts again. You can’t have your first love and first heartbreak again. You can’t have your first paycheck again. You can’t move out on your own into your first apartment for the first time again. You can’t have your first child again (going from not-a-parent to parent). As you experience more of life, you have a history of experience. You are no longer the blank slate you were when you were a child. Thus, it seems to me, that psychological richness as a source of happiness has to decline with age.

This is part of the challenge of teaching undergraduates. Their heads are spinning with the amount of change they are going through, and still only at a stage of potential. I think midlife is such a challenge because it is the point at which we really register the diminishment of psychological richness, but eudaimonia is still just getting started.

The midlife crisis is often a last, desperate attempt to feel the newness of firsts again. Midlife is when we have had time for all the responsibilities of adulthood to accumulate. We likely have a family, we are well into a career. The reduced experience of newness for experience couples with responsibility and leads to crisis.

So this is my speculation: In early life, psychological richness dominates. As we pass midlife, eudaimonia begins to rise and dominate. The result is the U-shape of happiness over the life course. If this is an accurate model, the question remains, what to do with this knowledge? How does this understanding shape how we should live our lives in early adulthood to cushion the transition?

I’d be interested in your thoughts. I will likely return to this question, but today I don’t think I have answers.

My oldest daughter, Daughter #1, has given me some fun Christmas ornaments that reflect my interests. Exhibit A: kayaking Santa Claus. I also have stand up paddle board Santa Claus, a gold scooter, and a tiny stand mixer. Thanksgiving officially marks the beginning of the holiday season for us. We have, over the years, developed a tradition of setting up the Christmas tree on the Friday after Thanksgiving. TLW and I have a pretty good system. We have all our Christmas decorations containerized, including the artificial tree that I love (sorry-not-sorry to all you real-tree elitists). On Friday morning, I drag the boxes up from the basement and TLW and I set up the tree, put the base layer of lights and garland on, and then, when the kids are able to join us, we put the decorations on.

There were years when we were in my Army career that we didn’t bother with a tree. We knew we would be going back to New Hampshire, so it wasn’t worth the time and effort. When we did set up a tree early in our marriage we used some standard baubles you might buy in sets. Over time, we have accumulated unique ornaments. I think this started to happen without much thought. We have a few ornaments the kids made in art class in elementary school still hanging on the tree. We have a metal Tripler Army Medical Center ornament from our time in Hawaii, and a Bayne-Jones Army Community Hospital ornament from our time in Louisiana that we got at the respective holiday balls. At some point we started to intentionally buy ornaments on our travels: a tiny Eifel Tower, a crown from London, cartoon characters from Disney, etc. Every decoration on the tree has a story. The tree itself has become something of a book about us.

I think traditions are hard to force, but sticky when they emerge naturally. We all have engaged in this tradition in various ways, adding to the collection of decorations. The collective action is what makes it stronger. We all agree, this is how we do it. I like the holiday season. It’s good to celebrate family and friends and kindness. I know different families have different ways of how they do it. It is nice that at a macro level, society celebrates this time of year and the values of giving, even if it is also heavily commercialized. It couldn’t be commercialized if there wasn’t an underlying real cultural agreement, this is how we do it.

The tree comes down on New Year’s Day, marking the end of the holiday season. Also a tradition. The decorations get taken down carefully, the tree boxed up. It all goes back to the basement, stacked, and ready for rapid deployment next year (yeah – I still have a bit of Army left in me).

I know not everyone is as lucky as we are. It is a time to remember that, too, and do something about it. Regardless, I hope you have a tradition that makes this season more meaningful for you. From the LHH, I hope your holiday season is off to a good start.

But that is in the future. Now, today, what is the cost of the cure for cancer? My mother passed away from cancer when she was only 50 years old. My family had good insurance. We would have paid a fantastic price for a cure for her in addition to whatever the insurance company would have paid. The fact is today, and back then, that there is no cure for cancer in general. Some cancers can be treated and stopped. We have made progress. But many cancers mercilessly grind on, exhausting all treatments, until the body gives up. Given there is no general cure, what is the cost?

A common, intuitive answer to this question is that it is $0 – nothing – because there is no cure. I would argue that $0 is not the correct answer. If it were zero, I should be able to get the cure for cancer along with sunshine and cool breezes and views of the ocean or walks at sunset. These are things that have zero cost – they are free. The cure for cancer is never going to be free, but it could eventually get to very cheap, in the way that cures for bacterial infections have fallen from near fatal to nearly free with the advent of penicillin and its descendants. Zero is the wrong cost for a thing that we desire but do not have the ability to create or access.

For most of my military career, TLW and I lived far from our families. In the 1990’s, we would regularly shop for long-distance carriers that had the lowest rates. For those of you born in the age of cell phones and unlimited talk and text and data, back in the dark ages you had to get two phone companies for your landline telephone. You had to get basic service from your local telephone company monopoly. The local telephone company provided connections to other phones in your local service area, but if you wanted to call out of town or across the country, you had to have a long-distance carrier. It was a big deal when Sprint (I think) cut their rates to $0.10 per minute. Imagine that – if you wanted to make a call to your mother back in New Hampshire who had just been diagnosed with cancer, you had to pay $3.00 to talk to her for 30 minutes. Gas was $1.00/gallon, and you could buy a combo meal at McDonalds for $3.00. Bear that in mind, in terms of relative cost. And Sprint was offering great rates. Cell phones were for the rich and famous, and cost obscene amounts of money, and all you could do was make calls on them. The internet sort of existed, but it was mostly limited to message boards between limited college campuses.

By the time I retired from the Army in 2015, everyone in my family had cell phones we carried in our pockets. We had unlimited voice calls – in town and long distance – the difference had ceased to be a thing. We had something close to unlimited data. Adjusted for inflation, we spent more on “phone” services than we did back in the 90’s, so you could say those services cost more – but what we were buying was different and orders of magnitude better. It is almost meaningless to compare the phone of 1995 to the phone of 2025, they are such different things. The cost of voice services, if we wanted to make a direct comparison, had plummeted to near zero.

The cost of cell phone services in 1995 were so high that almost no one had a cell phone. Today, even children carry phones (a problem to discuss for another day – but not one of financial cost). This is the nature of technological advance. A new technology starts out expensive – its cost keeping it out of the hands of most people – and then with advances, the cost comes down. Through the mid-20th century, the typical family spent nearly half of their income on food, and not $8 double half-caf oat milk lattes from Starbucks. Grocery store food. Only rich people ate out because only rich people could afford to, much like cell phones. Today the average family spends about 15% of its household budget on food, and half of that is on eating out, because we are richer, and eating out has fallen in relative cost. We spend more on “phone” services, but what we bundle into that spending is unrecognizable compared to what phone services looked like in the 90’s. Some technologies fall in price, like voice calls, with technological advances. But new technologies emerge and we add those to our basket, so it sometimes feels like costs aren’t falling. But really our basket is so much fuller.

Healthcare has this trait. Some technologies fall in cost. The basic x-ray is cheaper and more accurate today compared to, say, the 1960’s. You also get exposed to far less radiation. But now we have a whole new suite of imaging tools that we have added to our basket – CT, MRI, PET, etc. These are expensive because they are not very old, but they are getting cheaper (and better). On the one hand, we spend less on x-rays than we once did, but on the other we spend more on imaging than we did before because imaging is far more precise and valuable. These are two tensions in medical cost. Older technologies fall in cost over time, but new technologies are added at higher cost points at the same time, which then begin to fall in cost even as the next wave in innovation emerges. We spend more on healthcare today in the same way we spend more on eating out. We are richer, and we want more of it because it is better than it was at any time in history.

Technological advance is the story of the emergence of a new technology at a very high cost, with the technology only available to the very rich, followed by advances in production that bring the cost of the technology down so that gradually the technology is able to be widely adopted. Taken to its extreme then, the cost of a technology that does not yet exist is not zero but infinity. The job of scientists is to bring the cost of the next technology down from infinity into the realm of the possible. Cost falls from infinite to merely high so that the rich can afford it. Eventually the cost falls to low and everyone can get it.

We don’t yet know how to make the cure for cancer, thus the cost of the cure is beyond our reach. Medical researchers are looking for ways to discover the cure. What they are doing from an economic perspective is bringing the cost down. I doubt the universal cure for cancer will come in my lifetime, but advances will continue. I am hopeful that in my children’s lifetime we will see the eradication of cancer, as the cost comes down to where it can be spread widely, like cell phones in every pocket.

This contactless pick up is maybe one of the only good things that came out of the Pandemic. It’s become relatively common. But it is still pretty remarkable because it is representative of a high level of what social scientists call generalized trust. Societies have different levels of generalized trust, and that trust varies across different dimensions. Crime – especially property crime – is a good indicator of the level of trust. How carefully do you have to protect your valuables? Will people try to cheat you? I wrote about this idea a while back, and created the following diagram to help demonstrate:

We naturally trust the people closer to the center, and we are naturally more suspicious of the people on the outside, especially strangers. In a low-trust society, it isn’t true that we do not have any relations with strangers, we just do so with a lot of caution to avoid being taken advantage of. We write extensive contracts, we verify identities, we might only take cash. We certainly don’t just leave product on a shelf and let random people show up and take things, assuming they have paid. Business relations in low-trust societies are as a result more costly. All the checking and verifying is like sand in the gears. The checking and verifying is an example of what economists call transaction costs. If I order something online and have to interact with an employee instead of just grabbing it off of the shelf, the employee’s time is a cost to the business. If I can just grab my order and go, the transaction cost is lower for the business. The business can sell more stuff at a lower cost. More business happens at lower cost for both the customers and the businesses. The businesses wins and the customers win. But if the business lets people grab and go without verifying they actually paid, the business is vulnerable to theft. A business is only going to eschew verification in a high-trust society. Trust creates conditions for flourishing.

Looking at the research, here is a list of factors that represent a high-trust society:

1. People trust strangers, not just family or their immediate group. This means trust goes farther out in the circles diagram above.

2. Institutions are competent, impartial, and predictable. You don’t have to know someone to have the law enforced. Bribing judges doesn’t work, for example.

3. Voluntary associations are dense, producing bridging social capital. If you want a strong sense of community, it’s useful if you see the same people at church, in your softball league, and in your office. Even if you don’t see the same people, if you know they know the same people and you have overlapping circles of relationships, you’ll have more trust.

4. Norms of honesty, reciprocity, and promise-keeping are culturally strong. These vary across communities. Teaching these values is important.

5. Transaction costs are low, enabling large-scale cooperation, as discussed above.

Thanks to all of you who sent sympathies for my bum shoulder. It has made a remarkable recovery this week since I last wrote. It’s gotten better almost as quickly as it went sour, which has been a very strange experience. I had a few days where I was in a lot of pain, but now it’s still a little untrustworthy, but mostly better. Better enough that I was out raking this weekend because it’s November in New Hampshire and that is what one does. I was very conscious of what I was doing, and deliberately going slower than I normally would because the last thing I wanted was to spend another couple of nights sleeping in my recliner.

One of my personal failings, a character flaw, is that I do not pace myself well. I’m all in, or I’m not at all. I work at tasks like raking until I’m breathing hard and sweating, scraping the grass from the earth along with the leaves, rather than just taking it easy and letting the rake do most of the work. I don’t chunk out work well. It’s part of why I set up disciplines for myself, like doing a project 365 – picture a day. It runs intensely counter to how I normally work. But it’s good for me, forcing me to think about the long road and leaning into the work.

This weekend as I was raking I was hyper aware of this failing because I found myself falling into my usual ways, realizing I was pushing my shoulder too hard, and having to dial it back. I didn’t get as much done as I normally would have, but I was much more relaxed. It was nice being out in the 40-degree weather, with a November-white sky, sweeping the leaves up onto a tarp, then dragging the tarp into the woods so the leaves could return from whence they came. I didn’t get as much done as I would have, but I didn’t re-injure myself, and honestly, I didn’t leave that much on the ground. I’ll be back out next weekend because the oaks don’t let go of all their leaves until closer to Christmas, so it didn’t really matter anyway. Pacing. It doesn’t all have to be done at once.

I’m jealous of people who are good at pacing themselves. It’s a gift that plays well alongside deferred gratification. I’d like to think I’m a little better at it as I get older. Some of the improvement is driven by getting older and having to slow down, like this weekend. I’m not as fast as I once was, even if I wasn’t injured. I’ve read that the fast-twitch muscles go first. You lose speed, then strength. I was a little grateful this weekend for having to slow down. I think I enjoyed the time with the leaves more than I would have otherwise. Now if I could just do that in other parts of my life without the threat of bodily (re)injury.

**

This newsletter is coming out a day because I am bad at pacing myself and planning ahead. We celebrated TLW’s birthday this weekend and I just ran out of time.

I tell you this not to get your sympathy (well, maybe a little), but because I had a conversation with a colleague earlier this week about disability and the economic concept of quality adjusted life years (QALY). He was teaching about QALYs and a student with some disabilities approached him afterward to object to the idea that disabilities result in lower QALYs.

The concept of QALYs is pretty straightforward: assume that a year of life at full health gets a score of 1.0. If you get sick or injured and you are then limited from doing all of the things you would have done if you were in a state of full health, then your year gets scored as something less than 1.0. If your limitations are modest, your QALY may be 0.8. If your limitations are much more significant, your QALY would be scored lower – say 0.5 or lower. The idea is that we can use QALYs to compare quality of life across different states of being. This then allows health economists to make recommendations about whether certain treatments are worth funding.

Let’s make a super simple example that ignores important concepts like time value of money. Health economists in the US use the value of $100,000 as the value for a full-health life year. Conceptually, this means you would be willing to pay $100,000 to live one more year at full health. Let’s imagine now that you were going along with a quality of life of 1.0 and you get an illness or injury that drives your quality adjusted life year (QALY) to 0.5. Your willingness to pay (WTP) would drop to $50,000 ($100,000 x 0.5 = $50,000). Let’s assume that you will live 10 more years. The QALY value of your life is:

$100,000 x 0.5 x 10 = $500,000

What if we could pay for a treatment that would raise your QALY from 0.5 to 0.8? The value of your life at 0.8 QALY would be

$100,000 x 0.8 x 10 = $800,000

How much should we be willing to pay to give you that treatment? The treatment stands to give you $800,000-$500,000 = $300,000 in improved quality of life, so we would be willing to pay something less than $300,000. If the treatment costs $299,000, it is worth doing. If the treatment costs $301,000, it is not worth doing. That is an oversimplification of how the idea of QALYs is used, but it gets at the general idea.

When we turn over the responsibility to pay for our care to a 3rd party, that third party has to have some mechanism to make decisions about what is worth paying for and what is not. Payors such as insurance companies and governments use this sort of calculus to determine if they should fund treatments. They don’t want to pay more for something than it is worth. The problem is deciding how to measure benefits and costs and to do so over a large, heterogenous population in a fair manner.

One of the reasons US healthcare is more expensive than other Western countries is that the other countries have no problem using concepts like this, while we object to it. This is part of why managed care failed in the US – managed care implies allowing payors to decide when a beneficiary does not get care. This was a popular theme on hospital dramas like ER back in the 90’s. The heroic doctor (wearing a white hat) would announce that they have a treatment to cure a small, suffering child. Then a hospital administrator would enter and say, “We have to check with the insurance company to see if they will pay for it.” The insurance company representative would enter stage left, wearing a black hat and say, “We will not pay for it.” Inevitably it was framed around the insurance company wanting to make a big profit at the expense of small children, and not the fact that no one wants to pay for healthcare. And thus, we framed cost control in US popular culture as a fight of good vs. evil, while governments in the rest of the West just said “no”. This is a big part of why healthcare is more expensive in the US than in other developed countries. We can’t say no. The rest of the countries do their QALY-based benefit-cost analysis and say yes or no depending on the math.

Let’s go back to our earlier example and assume that instead of starting at 1.0 and dropping to 0.5, instead you have a disability, such that a health economist would assign you a baseline quality of life score of 0.6. You are now injured or become ill and your quality of life drops to 0.3. A treatment could bring you back to 0.5, but costs $300,000. The economist would say that the cost outweighs the benefits of treatment, since the benefit would be only $200,000.

Disability advocates would argue that the assignment of a lower quality of life score for someone with a disability does not reflect the subjective reality of the person with a disability. While some faceless economist at the National Health System may assign a quality of life of 0.6 to someone with a certain set of disabilities, that person living with disability may perceive their quality of life much closer to 1.0. Quality of life is highly subjective. A fully able person may have a lower subjective quality of life than a person living with disability depending on a range of factors other than ability. I think this is what the student was objecting to. How can you know that living with a disability in fact results in a lower quality of life? The literature actually shows that able-bodied people undervalue the experienced quality of life of people with disabilities. Quality of life is a subjective thing only really knowable to the person living it. To make cost controls work at a societal level, you need to some systematic way of deciding what to buy and what to refuse. Any time you try to assign an objective value to a subjectively experienced state, you are going to run into problems.

So, back to me. I’m experiencing acute pain if I try to reach into the refrigerator with my left hand and grab a snack (it feels like someone is sticking an ice pick into my shoulder - probably for the best). I’m having trouble sleeping because of the pain (not good). I can’t practice jiu-jitsu (also not good). I’m hopeful all this will self-heal over the next couple of weeks and I’ll be back to my usual activities, but for now my quality of life has taken a hit. Let’s say this never gets better. I go to the doctor and I am told there is nothing they can do for me. I will never not have pain in my left shoulder. One thing that is true is I will never be able to practice jiu-jitsu again. Other things I will make adjustments for. I won’t try to reach into the fridge with my left hand. I’ll figure out how to sleep more comfortably. Humans are remarkably adaptable creatures. I’ll find ways to adjust. I’ll miss my jiu-jitsu community, but I’ll find something to replace jiu-jitsu. My QALY, if you could measure it, subjectively might have fallen from 0.9 to 0.6 initially. I spend time grieving my lost health, but as I adapt to my new state, I would argue that my subjective QALY score would rise back closer to 0.9. Maybe 0.8, maybe even closer.

The fact is that my body is not what it was 30 years ago, or even 15. I’d love to have my 40-year-old body back, never mind my 25-year-old body. I would not like to be 25 or 40 again – age has brought some degree of wisdom – but it would be great to have that physical vigor. Objectively speaking, you would assign a lower quality of life to me today than 30 years ago because I am not as able as I once was. I can’t move as fast, I don’t recover as fast, and I get injuries with no apparent cause. One thing I learned from the disability literature is that we are all only temporarily abled. If you live long enough, you will see your abilities diminish – if you follow a normal course of life, it will first be physical, then intellectual. But does that mean that your quality of life has diminished? Quality of life comes from making a meaningful use of the gifts you have.

I think the disability critique is useful for thinking about QALYs. Trying to make an objective evaluation of a subjective state of being is problematic. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to extricate this problem from a system that has to make hard calls about resources. But the critique reminds us of what is important – anyone can lead a quality life.

Some 25 years later, I’m still not really sure what that means. How would you know if you were the best nurse in the Army? How would you measure it? It’s not like there is a head-to-head competition for best nurse. There is no nurse version of the Super Bowl or World Series. And even if there were, how much would we trust such a competition? Being a great nurse is a multi-dimensional challenge. If you had a competition, you would have to limit the evaluation to a few observable points. Also, there are so many different kinds of nursing, it would be an apples and oranges comparison. Being a great med-surg nurse is different from being a great OR nurse is different from being a great ED nurse is different from being a great outpatient clinic nurse and so on. And then what about nurse leaders? Yet another skill set that is different, again.

I remember reading an article about Michael Jordan, post-retirement. The same drive that made him Michael Jordan now is a curse. The article talks about how he is constantly competing, even has he turned 50 and was no longer a professional athlete. He competed with his staff on word puzzles, blackjack, and even the app Bejeweled. Everything is a competition. He is quoted in the article: “It’s an addiction. You ask for this special power to achieve these heights, and now you got it and you want to give it back, but you can’t. If I could, then I could breathe.”

The drive to compete and dominate, to win is core to who he is:

His whole life has been about proving things, to the people around him, to strangers, to himself. This has been successful and spectacularly unhealthy. If the boy in those letters from Chapel Hill is gone, it is this appetite to prove -- to attack and to dominate and to win -- that killed him. In the many biographies written about Jordan, most notably in David Halberstam’s “Playing for Keeps,” a common word used to describe Jordan is “rage.” Jordan might have stopped playing basketball, but the rage is still there. The fire remains, which is why he searches for release, on the golf course or at a blackjack table, why he spends so much time and energy on his basketball team and why he dreams of returning to play.

I’ve been thinking about the General and Jordan over these last couple of days and comparing them to how I think and behave. I see something of me in them, but also not. I think Jordan’s behavior can be decomposed into two things: drive and competitiveness. Jordan has an extraordinarily high amount of both of these things, which is what made him who he was.

I think it’s useful to decompose these two traits and look at how they can be recombined. If we think of Jordan, we see high drive and high competitiveness. Competitiveness is the will to dominate. Leaders throughout history have a will to dominate. Athletics of all sorts represent rule-based competition for dominance. It’s not a bad thing. We need it. Societies are built around hierarchy. Sport allows the expression of this competition in a controlled manner, unlike, say Game of Thrones. Competitiveness is ultimately about I (or my team) win and you (your team) lose.

Drive, separate from competition, is about accomplishment and achievement. If I have high levels of drive, I am going to look for things to accomplish. I can climb a mountain and feel a sense of achievement without considering if you also climbed the same mountain. Drive pushes us toward excellence. Excellence does not necessarily require competition. It can be aimed at an objective standard. Drive is about the pursuit of excellence against a standard one has in one’s own mind. That standard could be the accomplishments of someone else, but it does not require exceeding another person’s accomplishments.

Combine the two together and you get a person who desires to be excellent and to show that excellence by winning (be the best nurse in the Army – whatever that means; be a professional athlete, even if not at the level of Jordan). Jordan would be far over to the right and bottom of this two-by-two. Miyamoto Musashi writes about defeating one’s enemies through excellence in swordsmanship in the Book of Five Rings.

I think it’s possible to be relatively low on competitiveness and high on drive, though there is some element of comparison in most of what we do, especially those with high drive, so take this with a grain of salt – as a concept, not an absolute. Consider an artist, maybe a potter, who has an ideal of excellence that she pursues, year after year. She’s seeking perfection of her art. To the degree she’s focused on perfection and not on critics calling her the best potter ever, she’s high on drive and lower on competition. Other people can be great potters and that doesn’t make her crazy. One doesn’t win in pottery. Jordan had to defeat other basketball players – he had to win.

I think some criminal behavior fits into low drive/high competition. I’ve had friends who were criminal investigators and they note that the typical criminal is stupid and/or lazy. They felt entitled to things they had not earned. They wanted respect without effort. I think that is what best characterizes this quadrant - a sense of entitlement without a desire to earn it. Maybe not a criminal, but entitled.

The last box, low drive, low competitiveness is the person who has no motivation, driven either by a desire for excellence or dominance. I call this person the slug. This is the person who has not lived up to his or her potential. They have gifts they have not refined. They have wasted their possibility.

I think I am high on drive and relatively low on competitiveness. Maybe other people would see it differently, but I don’t tend to try to be better than other people to feel good about myself. At least I try not to. What I want is to be better than I was. It could be age has rubbed some of the competitiveness off me. Today, I try to think more about how I can help people succeed, and not how I can win over other people. Good salespeople, I have learned, look for ways for people to win together.

And yet, I confess at the far side of mid-life, I feel a lack of tranquility. I feel I have not yet done enough. This whole project, this quest for defining what a worthy life is, is an expression of someone looking for the right standard to judge what enough is, to satisfy drive. So, once again, I admit that you are on a journey with me. You are reading me thinking through these questions in real time.

I’m not saying there is a right box to be in. Well, maybe I am. I think you should be in one of the two bottom boxes, but you don’t have to go to extreme. Extremes are unhealthy – as Aristotle’s golden mean told us.

A haunting line from the Jordan article:

He knows he won’t ever play pro basketball again. He knows he’s got to quiet these drives, to find a way to live the life he worked so hard to create, to be still.

I wrote about the stages of human development as they are understood today by academics this past spring in my post about turning 55. In it, I included this graphic that runs through the key questions for each stage of the life course.

Does everyone one go through every stage as described at the times listed? No. It’s not universal, but it’s common enough that it’s a good general rule. Ubiquitous.

One of my colleagues, a fellow X’er, made the point that Gen Z’ers have grown up in a very different time than we did. Gen Z’ers have lived their lives online, in a world where every mistake and bad judgment is potentially documented and never forgotten by the internet. This is completely true. The teenage world is brutal, and I can’t imagine how much trouble I would have gotten into if I had had access to social media when I was that age. All of my missteps would have been amplified. Can you imagine being 15 and saying something insensitive online and having it go viral? Indeed, Gen Z’s adolescent world was different from Gen X’s. All the generations have been affected by the advent of the internet and then social media. Society has never been so connected instantaneously. It didn’t just change adolescence, it changed how other generations experienced other stages because suddenly we could see what other people were doing and thinking in a way that we had never been exposed to before. All of society is still adapting to this new way of relating.

Gen X’s adolescence was different from the Boomers’ because there were major social changes afoot. The success of second wave feminism made it commonplace for mothers to work outside of the home. Divorce became rampant. Gen X’ers were latch key kids – unsupervised when not in school. As great as the new freedoms were for both women and men, they came at a cost. As a society, we had to adapt, much the way we are doing now to the influence of social media. But we still had to deal with the questions of adolescence, which were largely the same for Gen Z, as they are now for Gen Alpha. We just had a different social context.

The questions that arise at each life stage are consistent across generations. Because each generation faces those questions in a different social context, the particular expression will look different. Young people today going through emerging adulthood still have to separate from family, begin exploring adult roles, explore work, love, lifestyle; and begin making tentative commitments. The tasks are the same today as they were 30 years ago for us X’ers, and 50 years ago for the Boomers. The environment is different. The opportunities are different, the means of doing things is different. And so, the lived experience will be different. But there is still a throughline of commonality. It’s still the human story of trying to find a place of our own.

Don’t trip over the past. – Author unknown

It’s fall at the LHH. I spent about three hours blowing leaves back into the woods from whence they came on Saturday. Fallen leaves are physical manifestations of what once was.

The above quote is often ascribed to Seneca, but from my research, it appears there are no sources to confirm it. Nevertheless, it carries a Stoic sentiment. To move forward, one must let go of the past and not try to keep relitigating it. We must integrate the lessons of the past into the present effort, not forget it. The failures of the past are not wreckage but the raw material of the future. The triumphs of the past are also a danger, in some ways, even more dangerous than the failures, because they lull us into a false sense of completion. Success tempts us to stop trying to refine and improve ourselves – as if we had reached the end – but there is no end except the end.

To live a worthy life is to always be in motion – moving forward – learning from the past’s failures and successes – but never accepting that the process of growth is done. The past provides the lessons, the present the arena, and the future the invitation to become something better.

Here’s how ChatGPT describes it:

VUCA stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity — a framework first popularized by the U.S. Army War College in the late 1980s to describe the strategic environment after the Cold War. It has since been widely adopted in management and leadership theory to characterize the rapidly changing, unpredictable conditions of the modern world.

Here’s a breakdown:

1. Volatility – The rate and magnitude of change. Conditions shift rapidly and unpredictably, often without a clear pattern.
   Example: Economic markets, public health crises, or technological disruptions.

2. Uncertainty – The lack of predictability and inability to foresee future outcomes. You may know the variables but not how they will interact.
   Example: New policies or competitors entering the field with unknown impacts.

3. Complexity – The number and interdependence of factors that must be considered. Even with complete data, the sheer number of connections makes prediction difficult.
   Example: Healthcare systems, where economic, social, and biological factors all interact.

4. Ambiguity – The lack of clarity about meaning or cause-and-effect relationships. Situations are novel, and past experience may not apply.
   Example: A new technology or social shift that doesn’t fit prior models.

The main thing I have been circling on is how should individuals absorb this idea? How should you live if you believe that the future is fundamentally unknowable in the ways VUCA describes? A few incomplete thoughts. I’m talking to myself here – see if you agree.

1) Balance specific and general investments.

Education vs. Training. Education is a great general investment. Education prepares the mind for complexity and ambiguity. Studying economics, for example, is an excellent general investment, but it doesn’t yield specific skills that can be used to earn money, unless you want to teach economics. You have to make specific investments in technology and markets to apply economics. Studying engineering is similar. You have general concepts, but you need specific applications to be valuable. In a VUCA world, the specific skills can suddenly be obsolete. Maybe because of AI, or the internet, or electricity, or the combustion engine (going back through various revolutions). Education helps you switch to the next thing because the general skills of dealing with complexity and ambiguity help you navigate and find what is next. Too much abstract education never gets you anywhere. Too much investment in specific skills leaves you vulnerable to change.

Real assets vs. financial assets. Your house, your car, your stuff are real assets. They have functional value separate from the market. There are ways to get income out of them – you can use them yourself or you can rent them to others. Selling them often takes more effort than financial assets. Financial assets are your bank accounts, brokerage accounts, 401K, etc. Financial assets are mobile and generally easy to liquidate. A couple of clicks and they can be converted to cash or transferred across the country. Houses typically can’t be easily moved, and if you need to pick up and go somewhere else for opportunity, it can be difficult to sell, especially if the reason you want to leave is the neighborhood around you is doing poorly. Real assets do very well during times of inflation or uncertain financial markets. Inflation kills financial assets. It’s good to have a balance of both.

2) Hold tightly to a few things and loosely to the rest

Hold on loosely to jobs, even careers. If you’ve done a good job of balancing education and training, you should be able to move on from one thing to the next. Don’t over invest in a single employer or business. You can love a company (organization, university, the Army) but companies can’t love you back because they are not human. I think it’s important to realize that. I saw many people have their hearts broken by the Army when they didn’t get selected for promotion or were told to leave sooner than they had hoped.

Hold on loosely to most relationships – with most people and most organizations. In life we go through many relationships. We may need to move from one to another. I don’t mean screw people over. I really mean just the opposite – treat everyone well. But don’t make excessive promises, and don’t lead people to believe you are more committed to them than you are.

Hold on tightly to a few relationships. Spouses, children, close family. A few friends who make their way into your inner circle. You can’t control these people, and the tighter you hold on to them, the more vulnerable you are. But some relationships are worth taking the risk for, because these are the relationships that give your life its deepest meaning.

The advantage of holding on loosely to most relationships is you can have more of them. I’m convinced, at this later stage of life, that relationships are the most productive asset because they are the most likely way that the next thing will come to you.

3) Always be looking for the next thing

VUCA is a Machiavellian concept. As I often quote him, “I hold it to be true that Fortune is the arbiter of one-half of our actions, but that she still leaves us to direct the other half, or perhaps a little less.” He goes on to talk about building dams and canals against the river of Fortune when the sun is shining and before the flood that inevitably comes.

Defense is important in a VUCA world. Balance your investments. Hold on tightly to only a few things. But so is openness. I won’t call it offense, but it is sort of that, except the best “offense” is to look for ways to collaborate and win alongside other people. It isn’t so much offense against other people as it is offense against fate.

VUCA is a double-edged sword. When it cuts, it creates loss and opportunity. You should always be looking at the volatility and uncertainty as a source of opportunity. You need to be looking for the next thing, even if you are feeling secure in your current thing, whatever that is.

I think if you have a lot of loose relationships with people whom you have treated well, and you have done a good job of balancing your investments, those people will see opportunities and think of you, because they will remember that you are educated and flexible and able to respond to changes in the environment. Although this should be intuitive, it’s been documented in the sociological literature since the early 70’s (Granovetter, The Strength of Weak Ties).

So those are three points I’ve been thinking about since I was reminded about VUCA. What are your thoughts on VUCA? Do we live in a VUCA world? How do you think about coping and thriving in a VUCA world?

They’ve been together for several years and lived together for over a year. TLW and I have no doubt that they love each other, and we think that they are a good match. They were committed to a life together way before last weekend when they went through the formalities of the marriage ritual. What happened was the ritual takes the internal and private and makes it external and public. The ritual externalizes the commitment. We, the community, grant what was previously only internal a formal existence.

For me, I think the strangest thing is to realize that her husband is now her legal next of kin. If she gets hurt and can’t speak for herself, he will be the one to make decisions on her behalf, not TLW and I. They are legally one unit now, especially economically. This is part of the legal recognition of their mutual agreement to care for each other. The community will look to him, not to us. This is the part that is disorienting for me. For a quarter of a century, TLW and I have been responsible for her (in a backstop kind of way – she was a fully functional, independent adult). Now she has chosen someone else for that role. We have been demoted, in a sense. And that is how it should be.

Rituals externalize the internal. If you weren’t already there, some words and rings, or a graduation gown, or whatever other ritual and associated components you want to think about aren’t going to make you ready. They do help us orient life’s transitions. Not just the people going through the ritual, but the whole community. We gathered on that mountain top to affirm what we already knew.

My daughter and I share an enduring love of the Muppets, and so she wanted our dance to be to The Rainbow Connection. I make a reference to the song in my speech.

Regular readers will recognize some of this material from previous essays. See you next week!

[TLW] and I would like to welcome all of you to this special evening. What a privilege it is to have you all here to celebrate the marriage of K and C. You’ve come from down the street in Pembroke and Dover, Hingham and Pembroke, but also you’ve come from New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Georgia. Some of you have come from even farther away in Houston, Fort Worth, and Washington State. It’s hard not to feel the love you all have for the lucky couple, and for the family they have forged today, and your presence shows how much you wish them happiness.

You just have to look at the two of them to see the happiness they bring to each other. Just the other day, [TLW] and I were running late to meet them for dinner, and when [TLW] texted to say we would be 15 minutes late, K replied that it was ok, they were already in the restaurant parking lot and they didn’t mind waiting, because they like being together. I think that speaks volumes about their relationship. Just being together in a restaurant parking lot is enough.

As wonderful as today is, a lot of life is going to be like that story. Waiting for this or that. Doing the mundane tasks of the day to day. Cooking dinner, washing the dishes, getting the oil changed in your car, mowing the lawn, going to work. Rinse and repeat. Sometimes literally rinse and repeat. Liking to be together through all of that is going to matter a lot. These are the spaces where you have to find the small happinesses of just being, and being happy together. And I want to say that takes work. It takes patience and forgiveness, it takes ignoring small flaws, and it takes intentionally looking to make your mate happy in small ways.

There will be other big spikes of happiness – the big moments like today – the birth of your first child, the birth of your second, and of course, the birth of your third. K was our third, just in case you missed the reference. K and C have said they are looking forward to having a family. The birth of a child is nothing short of a miracle. But then there will be changing diapers, getting up in the middle of the night, night after night, after night, after night, in what will seem like an endless, sleep-deprived repetition, that is not endless and indeed ends far sooner than you realize. It’s hard to find happiness sometimes in those moments when all you want to do is sleep. And after this stage there is always more. Building a family takes a lot of work. Much of it is waiting around or the equivalent. That isn’t to say that there isn’t joy in seeing little faces run to the door to welcome you home, or coming to see you in the morning, waiting to be held and loved. But it is a lot of work and sacrifice to build a family and a life together that brings life satisfaction, when looked back on.

As some of you know, K studied psychology. Psychologists talk about two kinds of happiness – experienced happiness and reflective happiness. Experienced happiness is the happiness of the moment. It’s fun. It’s moments like this one, when you have your family and friends gathered around you, everyone looks beautiful, we’re having a few drinks and we’re about to eat good food. In reality, a lot of life is not like this. A lot of the important things we need to do aren’t fun. You don’t really need marriage for experienced happiness – it just happens. It’s hard not to be happy on a night like this.

You need marriage for the hard work that generates reflective happiness because marriage is an essential building block of a life well-lived and life satisfaction. Marriage is a commitment to stick together when things aren’t fun. When the kids get sick. When jobs don’t work out. When you try for something and fail. If everything was always fun and life was always full of experienced happiness, you wouldn’t need it. As our song said,

Who said that every wish would be heard and answered

When wished on the morning star?

Every wish won’t be heard and answered. Building a life together, building a family together, is hard work and isn’t always fun. Marriage is for the worse part in “for better or worse”. A marriage is a lifetime project. It is a thing you come together to create and continuously nurture. It is a thing you hold up and look at in your heart. It is actually at its best when things are at their worst. Because you’ll look back and reflect, and say to yourselves, I don’t know how we made it through those hard times. It will be because of the connection you have forged, your commitment to the marriage, to your project of you, together.

When we think of a happy marriage, we don’t think of a marriage where everyone is giggly all the time. That’s just not life. It’s being kind and supportive, and being there for each other. It’s finding a way to be happy together most of the time, even if it’s just waiting in a parking lot. It’s about hanging together when things get tough. It’s about accomplishing together what you could not do alone.

So here is to K and C. As you walk together through the ordinary days and the extraordinary ones, may you always remember the rainbow connection that first brought you here, hand in hand. May that connection stay strong through the years and decades ahead, for better or worse. And may you find happiness together, in the moment, and satisfaction in reflection, forever.

Greetings from a rainy, gloomy, LHH! TLW and I had hoped to go out for a run together this morning, but rain, like I said. So instead, we each took turns running on the basement treadmill. I haven’t been keeping up with my running this summer because I’ve been hitting the jiu-jitsu gym five days a week, which leaves relatively little room for other activities. To be honest, I get lazy and make TLW walk instead of run. As I noted in this past week’s RWL, the temperatures have cooled enough, especially in the morning, that the biting insects have settled down and probably won’t be out much again until next spring. The LHH sits right next to two large nature reserves, so we can either walk out our back gate into one or cross the street and be in the other. But walking is not the same thing as running. Running is by far the best bang for your buck when it comes to exercise. And I don’t like it. So, I try to avoid it when I can, like kale. It’s good for you, but no one really likes it. Kale tastes like green sailcloth. I mean people pretend they like it, but we all know what’s going on in their heads. But then I feel guilty because I know it’s good for me, but by then it’s been weeks since I last ran and then it feels even worse. Blah.

So, there I was, standing in the kitchen, looking out the back window, drinking my coffee as I often do. I was alone because TLW had run first and had already eaten her breakfast and had gone upstairs to shower. I’ve said before, this is one of my favorite places in the LHH, looking out over the back gardens and into the nature reserve beyond. It’s very peaceful, and I’m always grateful to have such a view. Early morning, having exercised and feeling like I’ve accomplished something (even if I don’t enjoy the process – having done it feels good), it's a good time to reflect.

What I was thinking about when I took the above picture was a conversation I had with a guest when I invited her to be a guest on the FITW podcast to (I’m going to leave out the name because I didn’t ask permission to share this conversation). I was trying to explain to her the nature of the FITW project and I said something like, “The goal is to get at the nature of meaning, to avoid the regrets people have on their deathbed.” I explained my idea of meaning being primarily about accomplishment. Her response, wisely, was, “That’s not what people think about on their deathbed. Maybe when they reflect in their fifties or sixties, but not at the end of their lives.” I think she’s right about that. I don’t have a lot of experience with death up close. What I have read is that the mind starts to be less coherent and thought becomes less clear. Last words are generally just garbled nonsense, not poetic aphorisms. I think at that moment I would just like to know I am not alone, and that people care about me. Perhaps leading up to that moment, there is a desire to set right the harms one has done, and to seek atonement. I think the desire shifts from things like competence and contribution to primarily connection at the very end.

The chain of thought that led me to that reflection was the fact that I am behind on a bunch of things, including some grading (already), and my textbook project. And of course, writing this newsletter, which I try to do on Saturdays, but I had spent most of the day at the office, and hadn’t gotten around to it. TLW and I did make a quick journey south of the border (down to Mass) to see our daughter in the evening, which was nice. I stood there, looking out at the world, and thought about whether I have my priorities in order so that I really don’t have regrets on my deathbed. (Answer: Surprise! Probably not.)

There is also a lot of time, hopefully between then (death) and now. Hopefully. But you never know. Striking that balance between pushing yourself to fully actualize all that you can do and become, while also sustaining robust and meaningful relationships, especially with those closest to you, is not that easy. In fact, it’s much easier to take for granted the people who are closest to you that they will always just be there. The reality is that they won’t, and you won’t. We don’t know when the end is coming. Making those investments in connection need to be made deliberately.

TLW has always been really good at this. She started writing notes to our daughters each week when they were in college. She’s continued that habit till today. Like running, it doesn’t take that much time. It’s a matter of discipline. The kids like getting them. It is a reminder that their mother loves them. I think the act also matters for TLW. The willing good to another is like a river that runs through the same channel, deepening it a little more each year. Not that she needs practice – her river already runs deep – and the kids know it.

I think we can all let our rivers run a little deeper by being deliberate in our investments of time. Balancing the three Cs of meaning – competence, contribution, and connection – is harder than it sounds. I know I’ve spent most of my life focused on the first two, and not always on the third. I’ve had to be reminded at times about the third. I do try to be deliberate about it, but it’s easy to slip out of that habit, like slipping out of running. (But not eating kale. I’m not going to apologize for that.)

Ironically, as I am writing this, I received a text from an old Army friend who wanted to catch up. We’ve made a plan to have a call tonight. I can’t claim that initiative, but maybe it is the universe answering my aspiration.

– Nicolo Machiavelli, The Prince

I am fond of this passage from Machiavelli’s The Prince. It’s a reminder that we are neither wholly able to control our fate, nor our we wholly at the mercy of forces beyond our control. This has been the theme of my last two posts. In Pride v Gratitude, I argued that we should be justifiably proud of the things we accomplish, but that we should be grateful for the start in life that we inherited through luck of birth and no action of our own. In Social inheritance is the gift that keeps on giving, I clarified the nature of our inheritance – that it is not a lump sum granted at birth, but instead comes to us over time as a result of our socio-economic status – people of higher socio-economic status are given more access and opportunities over their lifetime. It’s not true that lower socio-economic status people cannot rise to very high socio-economic status in America. It is true that it is harder to reach high socio-economic status if you start at low socio-economic status. It is dangerous to overemphasize the challenge of starting low and trying to rise. If one does not believe on can work hard and accomplish great things, it is unlikely one will try. America has historically been a place where people emphasized opportunity and potential, rather than the challenge. I was lucky to grow up with the influence of immigrant family members who believed in possibility. When I encountered the Marxist view that one’s birth class (feel free to substitute whatever identity you think is fashionable – race, ethnicity, gender, sex, sexual preference, etc.) was determinative of one’s life outcomes, it offended me at the core. It is repugnant that someone can look at my circumstances of birth and make an assertion about my human potential. But part of my own social inheritance is a high sense of self-efficacy. As a teacher, it’s something I try to give to my students. I think it’s something we all have an obligation to encourage in others.

Albert Bandura pioneered the study of self-efficacy in the late ‘70’s. Self-efficacy measures the degree to which you believe you can execute the behaviors necessary to accomplish specific performance outcomes. It’s not necessarily the actual ability or skill to do something, it is the confidence that if you attempt something, you will accomplish it. People with a high degree of self-efficacy will take on more difficult challenges and stick with them in the face of setbacks and failures. People with low self-efficacy will tend to avoid challenges and give up more quickly and generally have lower levels of achievement.

Bandura identified four main sources of self-efficacy:

1. Mastery experiences – succeeding at a task builds confidence; failure (especially early) can weaken it.

2. Verbal persuasion – encouragement or coaching from others can strengthen self-belief.

3. Vicarious experiences – seeing others (especially peers or role models) succeed increases belief that you can too.

4. Physiological and emotional states – stress, anxiety, or fatigue can undermine efficacy, while positive mood and energy can enhance it.

Each of these sources have some tie to social inheritance. Higher socioeconomic status parents have the capacity to invest a lot in their children will ensure their children experience mastery. They provide them opportunities to get training and to join sports teams and social organizations where they will have a chance to experience success. They will encourage their children and seek out mentors and tutors for them. The children of successful parents will naturally just assume success is natural since they have their parents’ example. Physiological and emotional states such as stress, anxiety, and fatigue are less likely to be experienced if you are higher socioeconomic status. It’s possible to develop higher self-efficacy on your own, but I think much of it comes from social inheritance.

There is a disagreement in the literature about whether self-efficacy is generalized, applying across a broad range of tasks, taking on more of a personality trait, or if it is specific to particular tasks. Bandura himself believed it was specific.

I tend to lean toward the researchers who see it as more trait-like, with generalized confidence. I’ve known many people, especially in the Army, who believed in their general ability to take on almost any problem. It wasn’t arrogance, it was confidence that if a thing could be done, they would have some potential to do it. They would at least give it a try. They also weren’t stupid, and they knew they didn’t have the skill to do anything. So, some of their problem solving was oriented toward finding a team they could work with to solve the problem. They weren’t going to attempt neurosurgery, but they would sure work like heck to find a neurosurgeon if that was the solution. The Army instills self-efficacy through training and culture. I can think of examples of both training and culture that try to reinforce all four of the sources of self-efficacy.

Where self-efficacy is the belief that you can solve a problem, agency is the capacity to actually solve the problem. Without self-efficacy, you will sit passively even when you could act. You can, of course, have too much self-efficacy when you in fact do not have agency. A person whose self-efficacy exceeds his agency is someone who is overconfident and cannot actually effectuate the change they believe they can.

What I like about Machiavelli is he is proposing that we have a high degree of agency to affect the outcomes of our lives. He tells us that Fortune may command half of our lives, but the other half - “perhaps a little less” - is left to us. If you read the chapter this quote is from, he is critiquing people who lack self-efficacy but have agency; people who could take action, but don’t believe their actions would matter. That is not a way to live a worthy life. Bandura shows us that self-efficacy is the bridge between what Fortune allots and what agency can accomplish. If we believe we can act, we are more likely to act; and if we act, we sometimes succeed, even against long odds. Much of what we inherit—socially, economically, emotionally—tilts the scales toward greater or lesser confidence, but each of us has a duty to cultivate self-efficacy in ourselves and encourage it in others. To do otherwise is to waste the gifts of circumstance and diminish our agency. A worthy life, then, lies in recognizing both the limits and the possibilities: accepting what Fortune denies us, but building competence, contribution, and connection wherever we can. In doing so, we make ourselves fit for society and strive toward meaning - not by waiting passively for outcomes, but by acting as though our actions matter, because they do.

Last week I talked about when we should feel pride and when we should feel gratitude. I argued that we should feel gratitude for the gifts in life we have received that we did not earn, but that we should feel pride for the things we have earned.

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Person 1 is born with an inheritance I₁ that is modest. She works hard and ends her life at E₁. Much of her final status is the result of her work, because her inheritance got her less than halfway to where she ends. Person 2 is born with a more robust inheritance, I₂. She works modestly hard and ends at E₂. Person 1 has a lot to be proud about, even though her end point is where Person 2 begins. Person 2 should mostly be grateful for where she ends (E₂) because most of where she gets to was given to her (“You didn’t build that,” as President Obama said).

The way I presented this is as if all of the inheritance arrives at the moment of your birth. But in fact, for most of us, our inheritance trickles in over our lifetimes. By inheritance, remember, I don’t mean an infusion of wealth, though wealth is one factor. Inheritance includes all the social determinants of social success. A non-exhaustive list would be wealth, health, social status of family to include race, ethnicity, and class. Also, geography – being born near a major city with lots of educational and economic opportunities vs. being born in a rural setting with neither. Feel free to add more. Let me address class specifically because that is the factor that resonates most strongly with me, and I think rolls up - and frankly dominates - the others (because apparently, I am a neo-Marxist).

I see class in my students when I try to prepare them for professional opportunities. Kids who come from successful, middle or upper middle-class families (we don’t tend to get uber rich kids at a state school like UNH) tend to get the social niceties of working in a white collar industry. Simple things like you have to be on time, you have to be respectful, you have to shake someone’s hand and look them in the eye when you do it are all part of the water they have been swimming in since they were born. It’s sort of the JD Vance story of knowing which fork to use at a formal dinner. If you’ve never been to a formal dinner, you don’t know which silverware is the right piece for the right course. Business today does fewer formal dinners in my opinion but take that as a metaphor. There are so many other tells. Clothes, shoes, etc., but also the things you talk about, which sports you follow, what kind of cars you admire. People naturally engage in a high degree of homophily – liking people that are like them. I would argue it is not a conscious thing. We just naturally want to help people who are like us. If you have the class markers of an upper middle-class kid, members of the upper middle-class are going to naturally help you, because homophily. Thus, upper middle-class kids will get little boosts all along through their growing up, and when they enter the workplace, they will continue to get them if they carry themselves as belonging to the upper middle class. One of the functions of the college experience is to act as a finishing school for the middle class and above, depending on the school you go to (UNH and similar state schools are good for middle class; expensive liberal arts schools are good for upper middle and upper class).

Your class markers are what gets you into the spaces to get the opportunities to gain wealth and status – to move along my continuum to the right. It’s much harder to move along that line without help. Here’s a classic Eddie Murpy SNL satire on the topic of homophily:

My argument isn’t just that white people give each other stuff, it’s that we all give people who are like us stuff. We give opportunities and chances, and second chances to people who are like us because we see ourselves in them. We have to work to get past that very natural inclination.

As I said, Person 1 begins with an inheritance of I₁. Let’s say that’s equal to 10. Ten is an arbitrary number, but it lets me do some simple math. In reality, Person 1 doesn’t get all 10 of her inheritance at once. Instead, she gets a little boost over time. Let’s imagine it in terms of decades. When she is born at time zero, she gets her first bit of her inheritance. Let’s say that is worth 2. So, at time 0 she gets 2. Let’s imagine that she lives 8 decades, so at the start of each decade she gets her boost of 2. Over her life, she gets her initial 2 plus 2 more units each decade, for a total of 2 + 8 x 2 = 18.

Because she is going to have to wait for decades for some of her boosts, some of those boosts aren’t worth very much to her when she is born, so we can’t just add them up and say they are worth 18. If I have to wait 80 years for something, it isn’t very valuable to me today. Imagine if I promise to give you $100 eighty years from now, or some amount today. How much money would you be willing to take today instead of $100 eighty years from now? It would probably be a relatively small amount, certainly much less than $100 – maybe about $25. This calculation that you intuitively understand is a concept called discounting. We discount the future because we prefer the present. We don’t like to wait. We can discount a series of future flows, like the series of boosts that Person 1 will get over her life. This is called the present value of future flows. If we discount the future at a very conservative 1.7%[1], then Person 1’s future flows have a net present value (NPV) of 10. The last boost is worth only 0.51 when Person 1 is born in today’s value.

In similar manner to Person 1, Person 2 gets her boosts over time as well, but hers are much larger, at 5 per period. Person 2 was born to a higher status family, and carries those status markers with her wherever she goes. She doesn’t necessarily even realize when she’s getting help. She thinks people are just nice to her. Which they are because they recognize her markers. Those boosts over a lifetime can be discounted as well, and she starts with a NPV of 25.

If we discount Person 2’s gifts at the same rate, her total inheritance is 25, but again, it comes in over her lifetime.

The point I am trying to make is my concept of inheritance is not an all-at-once gift, but instead something that is granted year after year, decade after decade. It is the privilege of being middle- or upper-class and having those markers.

Unlike an all-at-once gift, there is some risk because the gifts come in the future. You can screw things up for yourself and lose your inheritance by failing to sustain your class markers. This is one of the things parents fear. As a parent, there is only so much you can do to keep your kid from squandering her inheritance. And of course you want them to build on what you have given them by putting in their own effort, which goes back to last week’s post. The inheritance is just the start. One still must put in the effort. Importantly, one has to believe that the effort will pay off. That will be next week’s topic – self-efficacy.

[1] The lower the discount rate, the more you value the future. People who are big on YOLO who spend all their money as soon as they get it have high discount rates. People who save a lot for the future tend to have low discount rates. 1.7% would represent a person who thinks a lot about the future.

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When I was in ROTC, every event we ever had, whether it was a cadet ball or a house party, at some point someone would put on Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA, and we would all start belting it out at the top of our lungs. It was a little goofy, but there was a lot of feeling there, too. In case you’ve not been exposed to this high culture, here’s the chorus:

And I'm proud to be an American

Where at least I know I'm free.

And I won't forget the men who died

Who gave that right to me

And I'd gladly stand up

Next to you and defend her still today

'Cause there ain't no doubt I love this land

God bless the USA

I was thinking about pride this week, and this song started banging around in my head. It’s a patriotic song, and I think it’s a good song. I admit it gives me shivers sometimes. But this week I was thinking about whether proud is the right word. I wonder if the right word isn’t grateful. All the rest is right on target.

What do I mean? Look, I’m not going to have an argument with anyone who is singing along with this song at a football game as the Blue Angels fly overhead. It’s fine to say you are proud to be an American. But when is it actually appropriate to say you are proud of something?

I was lucky to be born in the United States, and thus an American citizen. It is a privilege. I personally didn’t do anything to make that happen. That was just the luck of the draw. I could have been born in Syria, Somalia, Gaza, or some other place where I would never have had the opportunities that have been available to me. I was lucky to born to two parents who provided a safe home where I was never hungry or afraid of violence. That was a privilege, too. I was lucky to find an amazing life partner. Another privilege. We were lucky to have three healthy, beautiful children. Privilege, again. The appropriate response to luck is gratitude, not pride.

On the other hand, pride is appropriate for the things we have achieved through our efforts and hard work. I’m proud of my military service. I’m proud of the degrees I earned. I’m proud of my teaching. I’m proud of my department, to which I have dedicated the last ten years of my career. I am also proud of my children, to the degree that their success in life is the result of my contributions. And that is an important point – most of the things we are rightly proud of also have a large dose of luck. Michael Jordan got cut from his high school team. He didn’t just become Michael Jordan because of his genes. He became Michael Jordan because he poured his whole self into being the best basketball player he could be. As a teacher, every year I see kids who just aren’t putting the effort forward to live up to their potential. Sometimes I see high potential students fulfill that potential, and it’s amazing. Sometimes I see students who clearly don’t have the same level of natural ability pour their heart into their goals and I am just amazed. I’m proud of them because I do contribute to their success. But it’s mostly them.

We probably have far more to be grateful for than to be proud of. Coming at life from a position of gratitude is a great way to be humble, even if you are pouring your whole self into being great.

Let me try to represent my thoughts graphically. Here are two lives. Life 1 starts modestly. Person 1 is born to modest circumstances, represented by point I₁ for (I)nheritance. Her inheritance includes the social status of her parents, their relative wealth, as well as the social capital of her surroundings – probably a reasonably safe community with modest resources. Person 1 should be grateful for her inheritance – she has nothing to be proud about it - because as President Obama once said, “you didn’t build that”. Person 1 works hard, goes to school, climbs the career ladder or starts a business, has a nice family. At the end of her life, her social status has arrived at Point E for (E)arned. She is justifiably proud of her journey from I₁ to E₁. She could have just coasted and stayed her whole life at I₁. But instead she poured forth her effort and moved upward, accumulating resources and status that she can now hand on to her family.

Person 2 is born with an inheritance, I₂, that is the same as where Person 1 ends (E₁). She has many more resources to draw upon than Person 1 had to form the foundation of her life. Maybe Person 2 is Person 1’s daughter. Person 2 takes the social capital she did not earn and makes an effort in her life that brings her to E₂. She should be proud of her journey, and proud to be at E₂, but since her own contributions were modest relative to her final position, she should mostly be grateful and humble. For Person 2 to look at Person 1 and imply she arrived at her position (E₂) as result of her hard work would be profoundly arrogant. A tiny portion of her position is the result of her hard work – it is not nothing – but mostly it was the result of where she started.

I think we should be proud of what we have earned. To not be proud is foolish and false. But we should bear in mind that we start from an inherited baseline. That baseline inheritance is a complex mixture of geography, family, genetic endowments, inherited wealth and so forth. It does not come down to one thing. This is what the intersectionality theorists get right. What they get wrong is that the inheritance isn’t the only thing that matters. We all have agency, too. Effort matters. Effort is a critical component of the Worthy Life. Those of us who are born with great privilege have more to be grateful for and should temper our pride based on where we end, since we started ahead.

I’m a little proud to be an American, I admit. My service made a small difference. But mostly I’m grateful. I am proud of the things I have accomplished in my life because I have worked very hard. But I also acknowledge that had I not, at baseline, been born an American, many of those things would have remained out of reach. So I try to temper my pride with gratitude. We should be proud of the things we have earned. We should be grateful for things we have not earned.